Redirects are often used by webmasters to help forward visitors from one page to another. They are a normal part of how the web operates, and are very valuable when well used. However, some redirects are designed to manipulate or deceive search engines or to display different content to human users than to search engines. Our quality guidelines strictly forbid these kinds of redirects.

For example, desktop users might receive a normal page, while hackers might redirect all mobile users to a completely different spam domain. To help webmasters better recognize problematic redirects, we have updated our quality guidelines for sneaky redirects with examples that illustrate redirect-related violations.

As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take manual action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of the search results. If you have any questions about our guidelines, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.